Already packaged for Debian Jr.

This list and the comments attached are the personal opinion of the Debian
Jr. developers, and don't represent a formal pronouncement by Debian on
their suitability for children. The age range for this list is age 8
and under, although some of the more complex programs require help
from an older person.

The initial list and comments have been drawn up from packages list
members have tried with their children and they like. More will be added
as we look more systematically at Debian. Because the lists are
manually maintained, they are more than likely out of date. Please
email any submissions to synrg@debian.org
and I will have them updated.

A solar system and celestial body viewer. Ssystem uses OpenGL models
of the planets and various other objects. A 3d video card is
recommended, but it is quite usable (at ~3fps) on my P133 machine.
The interface is a bit difficult and confusing.

Openuniverse is the successor to ssystem, so we are working on having
that packaged.

This is a math flashcard game. If you take too long the computer
will "guess", at which point you choose whether the computer is
right or wrong. This twist makes the game more engaging than a
simple flash-card drill.

Children will enjoy generating a snowflake that matches their name
or the names of friends and family. Any sequence of characters
can be used to generate a graphical cryptographic key in the form
of a snowflake pattern.

Educational typing tutor game starring Tux. The children enjoy using
this game to learn how to type. It has funny sound effects and
graphics
that keep their attention. It doesn't really teach touch-typing,
though.

A clown is fired out of a cannon onto a teeter-totter which you control
to bounce a second clown up into the air to pop balloons under a big-top
circus tent. The game is funny and had my children in fits of giggles.

A newer "pong" game. It is a bit more difficult for children than
xboing because you cannot adjust the speed. A milder expletive is used
at the end of the game ("damn"). We haven't bothered trying to fix
this, as it is not quite as obvious or frequent as in xboing.
Furthermore, it appears a source-code change would be required to make
the fix. We have worked around the problem by suggesting creative
mis-hearings of the word (we have offered "dead", "jam", "jammin'", "toe-jam" :))

A classic, loved by the whole family.
(J, only 2, loves the sounds and bright colors while others play :))
In our opinion, the best "Pacman" clone. However, it has the
disadvantages that come with being a svgalib program. That is, it
cannot be played in X, and is a security risk, since it must run
as root (or suid root).

This is a clone of an old Commodore 64 game where you pilot a space
ship, blow things up, and try to retrieve a weight. I don't have any
kids, but I enjoy it. The package contains both svgalib and x binaries.

An excellent "pong" type game. Parents may not appreciate the
expletive
("aw shit") used when a ball is lost. However, this can be easily
fixed /usr/lib/games/xboing/sounds by copying "Doh1.au" on top of
"balllost.au".

You need a good 3D accelerated graphics card for this one. The
controls
are fairly easy to work, but the game is a bit shy on help. Compared
to
gltron, this one is a bit easier to control. Networked play is also
possible, though with only one system in the house with a decent 3D
card I haven't tried it yet.

Our children's favourite 3D accelerated game. Tux zooms down an icy
mountain race course gobbling up herring. Sometimes he gets stuck,
which is a bit frustrating. The "practice" mode is what the children
prefer to use.

Children probably need parental help to set up a match on a network.
With a network of old 486s and the parents' K6-2's, this game provides
some nice family networked fun. Based on the classic "bomberman"
game,
there are virtually limitless levels. The neighbor kids have nothing
like this at home (possibly because they don't have a house full of
old PCs :)

Like Boulderdash, this is a 2D scrolling puzzle game in which you guide
the hero with simple directional controls through one of seemingly
countless numbers of levels. The hero must avoid falling rocks and
other hazards and collect enough diamonds or meet some other
objective to open the exit and escape before the time runs out.
Children must use logic to work through a number of perplexing
situations in each level to guide the hero safely to the end of the
level. Being able to start at any level helps keep frustration in
check, as a difficult level can be simply left until later and a
different level chosen at any time. The integrated level editor is lots
of fun and relatively easy to use (although designing good levels can be
tricky for a child). The children love to play with the level editor as
well as play with the game.

A favourite for my 5 and ups. But "2 sided" puzzles are confusing for
the
young children. I'd like to be able to save as a default config for
the
children the "-side 2" switch to force all of the pieces to be flipped
over to side 2 at the beginning so they don't have to manually flip
them
over. Also, I'd like to be able to disable the middle-mouse-button
mapping to flip pieces, as they sometimes accidentally hit it, much to
their puzzlement (no pun intended) and frustration. A gui-based
puzzle
launcher that allows the child to point-and-click to choose the puzzle
image and size would be great.

Text games and puzzles the children love: boggle, hangman, worm,
snake,
arithmetic, fish. Some of the more challenging ones like quiz are
hard
even for adults, and therefore may only be suitable for your oldest
children.

Great for my youngest (2yo). Infants can start using this as soon as
they can be held on your lap to look at pictures either as they click
or you click for them. Even random pressing of keys produces results.

This is an xeyes-like desktop toy which supports a number of fun
themes
including Linus, Tux, Dust Puppy and a GNU. In addition to resizing,
you can flip the character with movable eyes upside-down or
left-to-right, or put it in "guilty/paranoid" mode in which the
character always looks away from the pointer instead of towards it.

The xeyes toy is included in this package. Even the very
youngest children (aged 1 or 2) will appreciate this classic
interactive
desktop toy. With some parental help, eyes can be resized by clicking
and dragging. Whole armies of eyes can be created which will all
obediently follow the pointer as the child moves the mouse.

Displays fireworks (as in the familiar xscreensaver hack) on
your root window. Unfortunately, there is no "stop xfireworks" at
this time in the menu. That's OK, though, as it was an opportunity to
teach the children how to use killall. Also, the fireworks "eat"
the image behind it, much as xhangglider does.

Fly hanggliders and paragliders around your root window. Although I
find that the gliders leave a black trail through desktop image
backgrounds, that bug might be considered a "feature" by many
children.
:)

In addition to using the screensaver hacks as screensavers, they can
be started with various command line options as toys for your
desktop (e.g. using the -root switch). On slower systems, screensaver
hacks may be more successfully run in their own window than in the
root window because they take less CPU to refresh. Use the -demo
option to try out different screensavers.

When the eldest children were very small and my most powerful system
was
a P100, we downloaded some wav sound-bytes from the net and made
appropriately named commands for bplay to play each of them. They
could
then use the VT-420 terminal in the livingroom to play these from
bash.
They learned how to play several in a row using semicolons between
them.
They also learned to use tab command-completion to help view and
select
the right one. The youngest, then aged three, could simply press
up-arrow and enter to play them over and over again until the parents
had enough. :)

The children have a number of their own CDs and can use the simple
commands "cdplay" and "cdstop" to start and stop playing. Although a
number of gui-based players exist, it just seems simpler to use this
tool.

Grip is a rather easy to use, once set up, ripper and CD player.
Copying your children's favourite CDs to your hard drive can make it
much easier for them to select and play their own music.

Use the patent-free, open-source ogg-vorbis for encoding. Grip
supports ogg as well as the patent-encumbered mp3 format. It refers
in the menus everywhere to mp3, but if you look closely, oggenc is
one of the possible encoders. Remember to change the output file
extension from mp3 to ogg.

Timidity++ is basically a command-line based MIDI file player that will
give you a new respect for the MIDI format. Rather than use the
built-in instruments of your sound card, which can sound rather poor,
Timidity++ uses software-based instrument patches which sound extremely
good. Timidity++ by itself has no instrument patches but
timidity-patches will provide them. Timidity++ does not depend on
Timidity-patches because you can use many different patches available
free and for a price from various sources. Playing a MIDI file with
Timidity++ and the Timidity-patches will sound very like the real thing!
You will never what to use the built-in instruments of your sound card
again! Timidity++ also has a few different GUI's available, but these
need to be compiled in. They are based on gtk+, motif or lesstif, even
an ncurses interface can be compiled in. I've played with a few of these
and find the gtk+ GUI to be quite easy to use, although it does generate
a few errors, I've never had it crash or hang on me. And I have used it
quite a bit. You would need to try the different interfaces and see
which would be best for the Debian JR project.

Starting out as just a WinAmp clone for Linux, XMMS initially provides
the exact same functionality for playing compressed audio files. It
has
a playlist and equaliser as well as being skinable. Thanks to the
modular nature of Linux, Lots of different input, process and output
modules are available for XMMS to expand its usability. It even has
an
OpenGL 3D spectrum analyser display available, but be warned!!! This
is
memory hungry without a great 3D graphics card to share the load.

Again, like grip, although originally intended for the
patent-encumbered
mp3 format, xmms can be used with the patent-free ogg format which is
what we recommend.

An indispensable research tool for school projects. Parents will likely
need to offer guidance to help children find appropriate and accurate
information via search engines and portals. Mozilla is now stable
enough to consider using it as a replacement for the non-free Netscape.

Visualize your processes in colorful blobs in a "lava lamp". This is a
great way to appreciate what's happening inside your system in a more
concrete way. The blobs use color to relate processes of the same kind,
size to indicate memory consumption, and speed to indicate cpu usage.

A simple, lightweight window manager. The fvwm buttons allow
easy single-click access to applications for the very young. At
the same time it is powerful and configurable so it scales well
as the child matures. There are more modern window managers available
with prettier features, but that usually comes at the expense of
bloating the window manager.

Wmaker is stable and lightweight. It is a modern, themeable window
manager with a fairly easy-to-use interface. It seems to be the most
popular window manager that parents use with their children at this
point (and for themselves as well). My only complaint with it is that
icons on the wharf need to be double-clicked to launch an application,
whereas single-click would be better for the very young. I find the
wharf easier to configure than fvwm buttons because a new icon box that
can be dragged onto the wharf is created automatically as you launch new
applications either from the command-line or menus.

This is more than just a window manager. It is a lightweight desktop
environment that will actually run on low-end hardware (unlike KDE
or Gnome). It is themeable, easy to use and configure, and has been
tested with our children with favourable results. Some work is required
to make the default panel that ships with it more child-friendly.

KDE & Gnome

In looking for a desktop environment, we realize that many parents
will want to try either KDE or Gnome, but in the interests of keeping
Debian Jr. a simple base, we have left those off the list for now.
Naturally, any programs in Debian, including the vast amount of material
available for KDE and Gnome may be added to enhance a Debian Jr. system,
just like any other Debian system.

In non-free or contrib

Unfortunately it looks like this will forever be non-free, the license
is really ugly. The kids all love it, and there's nothing like it in
main. We have finally decided to ditch this due to non-freeness and the
ethical issues surrounding use of proprietary roms. Besides, there are
so many new free arcade-style games now that we hardly miss it.

This displays a globe with placenames in your root window. The children
have fun making oneko walk all over the world. By default, the
globe turns once every five minutes so eventually you see the whole
world. There are command line options to change this and other
parameters, but if the Debian menu is used to start xearth, there is no
opportunity to deviate from the defaults. It would be nice for this and
other toys started from the menu to have a popup for the toy that allows
you to select different settings before it starts.

LyX is a very good WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean)text
editor. It should be good for any age for writing anything from letters,
to short stories and for later years writing essays and such.

LyX comes with an excellent tutorial and help structure. The
documentation is the best I've seen for ANY software on any O/S!

For the younger audience, they can just start typing away and see the
result with a ps or dvi preview. The sections can be selected from a
pull-down menu for easy formatting and there are a lot of tool-bar
buttons for most functions. There are a few different document types
available and as the child uses it more, they can learn how to create
more document types to suit their needs. Being LaTeX based, it gives a
good introduction to the TeX based world of text editing in a very easy
to use manner. Together with the tutorial and help documents, the child
can advance at their own pace until they are ready to move to TeX or
LaTeX for a truly professional DeskTop publishing tool.